A sweeping fictional account of the early Christians, whose unlikely beliefs conquered the world

Gripped by the tale of a Messiah whose blood we drink and body we eat, the genre-defying author Emmanuel Carrère revisits the story of the early Church in his latest work. With an idiosyncratic and at times iconoclastic take on the charms and foibles of the Church fathers, Carrère ferries readers through his “doors” into the biblical narrative. Once inside, he follows the ragtag group of early Christians through the tumultuous days of the faith’s founding.

Shouldering biblical scholarship like a camcorder, Carrère recreates the climate of the New Testament with the acumen of a seasoned storyteller, intertwining his own reckoning of the central tenets of the faith with the lives of the first Christians. Carrère puts himself in the shoes of Saint Paul and above all Saint Luke, charting Luke’s encounter with the marginal Jewish sect that eventually became Christianity and retracing his investigation of its founder, an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances.

Boldly blending scholarship with speculation, memoir with journalistic muckraking, Carrère sets out on a headlong chase through the latter part of the Bible, drawing out protagonists who believed they were caught up in the most important events of their time.

An expansive and clever meditation on belief, The Kingdom chronicles the advent of a religion and the ongoing quest to find a place within it.

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Quotes & Awards

“A provocative book, expertly read, this is a historical reconstruction for believers, and even more so, for nonbelievers. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

AudioFile

“The need to understand the role you have in the larger human story is at the heart of this beautiful, difficult book. Difficult not in form but in feeling, The Kingdom manages to get at the contradictions of what we call intimacy.”

New York Times

“A story of the telling of the world’s most famous story and an inquiry into how storytelling works that pushes, not infrequently, against the limits of what can be said.”

New York magazine

“A masterwork…[a] tour de force.”

Booklist (starred review)

“Memoir, fiction, and history combine in a stirring portrayal of the world of the first Christians…A passionate, digressive, empathetic history of religious rebels and the mystery of faith.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A frequently fascinating book written by a curious, sharp mind.”

Publishers Weekly

“An extended look at a spiritual crisis of earlier years…Reads less like fiction than accessible, brightly penned history.”

Library Journal

“Personal and rigorous, skeptical and open, casual and profound, and its speculative portrait of Saint Luke…is as compelling as any fictional life I’ve read lately.”

Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris

“Carrère is one of our planet’s most compelling, inimitable writers, and The Kingdom is, in my view, his greatest book yet.”

Tom Bissell, author of Apostle

Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

Listener Reviews

About the Author

Emmanuel Carrère, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2017, is a Paris-born writer, scriptwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of Limonov, The Kingdom,The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life As a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, he received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013. Several of his books have been made into films, and in 2005, he personally directed the film adaptation of his novel La Moustache.

About the Narrator

Karen Kingsbury is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than fifty inspirational novels. She has written many successful series and standalone books, including the 9/11 series, Oceans Apart, Between Sundays, the Women of Faith series, and a number of children’s books. Her book Like Dandelion Dust was made into an award-winning movie in 2009, receiving awards from the Las Vegas International Film Festival, the San Diego Film Festival, New York VisionFest, and others. Dubbed by Time magazine as the “Queen of Christian Fiction,” she has been a featured guest on the Today show and appeared in many publications, including USA Today. As well as being an author, she is also a songwriter; in 2009, she cowrote the song “Walls” with Richie McDonald and has written a song for Marie Osmond called “Tell Me to Breathe.”

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